Time is often kind to schlocky B-movies. With a few decades of hindsight, what once appeared cheap and sloppy can take on a certain crude charm – indeed, a veneer of innocence that makes even the offensive stuff appear kind of quaint. “Ah,” we might sigh. “Times were simpler then.” With any luck, the same fate awaits the new killer-gator flick The Flood, whose best (or perhaps just most amusing) moments are the ones that recall similar fare from 20-plus years ago.
The premise is straight out of a ’70s drive-in picture: A busload of dangerous criminals, each of introduced with their own badass title card, are forced to spend the night in the holding cells of a small-town sheriff’s station in rural Louisiana while a deadly hurricane rages outside. The water level is rising, as are (ostensibly, anyway) the tensions between the convicts, their handlers, and the hard-nosed lady sheriff (Nicky Whelan) who runs the joint.
Don’t forget the posse of mercenaries in bulletproof vests, who ambush the station on a rescue mission to free one of the prisoners, Russell Cody (Casper Van Dien), for reasons that remain unclear even after they’re explained. That happens just before a pair of alligators slither into the building through a vent in the roof, swimming through the waist-high water that fills much of the station and forcing this disparate crew to band together to survive. How did the alligators get onto the roof? Don’t worry about it. Strong winds, maybe.
The characters in The Flood speak in a melange of accents, from an earnest attempt at a Cajun dialect – shoutout to Eoin O’Brien as convicted meth cook “Big Jim,” unlicensed gator expert and the only truly likable character in the movie – to a Southern drawl that plays more like a British-Australian hybrid. They all talk real tough, and spit out dialogue with the intensity of the countless rounds impotently fired at thick-skinned gators throughout the movie.
At one point, a character declares that “cop killers” deserve the death penalty, typical of The Flood’s fawning attitude towards police and the military. To compound the discomfort, the only Black character, Jox (Randall J. Bacon), is a crude stereotype of a carjacker from the “‘hood.” Admittedly, it’s a little silly to critique the politics of a movie where a character slaps her forehead as she yells, “I need to think!” But the Punisher T-shirt of it all is noticeable, and therefore notable. (The Flood partially makes up for this by feeding a neo-Nazi, played by tattoo artist-turned-prolific B-movie jobber Mike Ferguson, to the gators.)
Speaking of prolific B-movie jobbers: The Flood was directed by Brandon Slagle, a specialist in churning out the type of films one might rent at a Redbox by mistake. Last year, Slagle directed three movies, all some blend of action and/or sci-fi. This year, he’ll do the same. Although this one is set in Louisiana, Slagle shot The Flood mostly in Thailand – not that you can tell, because most of the scenes take place in bare-walled rooms that look like they were constructed out of wet cardboard.
This is a movie that can afford standing water, but not a rain machine. An establishing shot of the sheriff’s station was clearly computer-generated, presumably to save on the expense of making a sign, attaching it to a real building, and filming it being pummeled by artificial precipitation. The only real thing in this movie is the stock helicopter footage of houses underwater after a flood; everything else, from the characters’ tattoos to the photos on the walls, is painfully fake. It’s obvious where the digital showers were superimposed over shots of overflowing storm drains, because the droplets are the wrong size and coming from the wrong direction.
This digital shoddiness is especially apparent when it comes to the alligators and the blood. Rather than try to hide the fact that its bloodthirsty reptiles are all CGI, The Flood lingers on shots of them swimming through the backwash of a hurricane and crawling up wet, slippery stairs in all of their unconvincing, weirdly see-through glory. Similarly, digital blood is defiantly sprayed everywhere, even splattering “on the lens” in a couple of shots.
The quality of said CGI is about on par with what you’d see in a Syfy original movie from the ’00s: Think a late Lake Placid sequel, or something like Supergator or Ice Spiders, both from 2007. And yes, the clumsiness of the VFX does give them a certain retro appeal – never mind that this is a brand new movie. Van Dien’s casting also calls back to the late ’90s, when his stardom was at its height. But if the only enjoyable things about your movie are the ones so backwards, they fling the audience all the way back to the ’90s, that doesn’t bode well for its release in the present.
